My Christmas project

Every year I give myself a little project to do that has the twin aims of providing an alternative to watching TV and keeps my “hand-on” skills with technology current. In the past I have built linux servers from scratch, learnt Ruby of Rails (remember that !!) and of course uncessfully tried to build a cheap …

A lesson in technical product marketing

In his rather influential book on Google, Jeff Jarvis describes how successful companies on the web need to “bring their customers into their processes”,  and by using open and transparent communications when things go wrong, companies will not only maintain but enhance their users trust. In a really inspiring series of posts to his blog, Martin Daly …

Data the key to the climate change debate : Part 2

As the thinking world watches the activities in Copenhagen rather than the latest news of Tiger Woods, the value of making climate change data more accessible a point I made last week, is gaining some momentum. This week the UK’s Met Office released a subset of HadCRUT data-set, just about the most comprehensive data-set of historic climate data. Already  John Graham-Cumming yes …

Data : the key to the Climate Change debate ?

Over the next week or so the media will be full of stories from Copenhagen as the world’s leader fly into the city for United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP-15. There will no doubt be limited progress towards agreeing to reduce greenhouse gases emissions globally, getting international governments to agree on anything is difficult, and …

The Weasley Clock and Google Latitude a mashup waiting to happen

In the UK there is a saying about waiting ages for a bus and then two come along at the same time. In the world of location based or context based computing it’s not exactly the case that there is little happening, but yesterday produced two interesting stories. I had the pleasure on presenting at …

Digital inclusion at the Royal Geographical Society

Having just watched Martha Lane Fox on the excellent Car Pool video Podcast presented by Robert Llewellyn,  I am now really looking forward to the meeting on the Digital Divide at the RGS next month. It is one of the Society’s 21st Century Challenges series, and will also feature Prof. Tanya Bryon, and will be …